Agriculture Study Abroad

 

Meet Emily Eggleston

 

 

 

           Entering Iowa State as a journalism major with no international travel experience, the College of Agriculture Study Abroad Office was well off the radar of Emily Eggleston. But after discovering agronomy and taking a few international trips, Eggleston finds herself president of the college’s international agriculture club, IAAS, and a leading advocate of study abroad.
            Changing course from journalism to agronomy with an international focus was a quick and rewarding decision. The inspiration to change came from agronomy professor Lee Burras, who gave a soils lecture to Eggleston’s natural resource class freshman year.
“I’d always had great interest in the environment,” she said, “but I had never really considered studying it until then.”
            After joining the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences as an agronomy and environmental studies major, Eggleston became involved with the Agriculture Study Abroad office and its student-run counterpart, the International Association of Students in Agricultural and Related Sciences (IAAS).
            “The goal of IAAS is to get students to interact while filling their global perspective of agriculture,” she said. And they do interact, both on-campus, at bi-weekly meetings, and abroad, at international conferences hosted by other IAAS chapters throughout the world. Eggleston and other IAAS members just successfully hosted a conference, “Harvesting Hunger: Linking Agriculture and Social Justice” for the Directors Meeting of the Americas (DMA) in San Francisco over spring break.
            Through her IAAS experience, including attending the 2008 DMA in Guatemala, Eggleston has acquired a love of international travel that extends beyond the organization. She spent a semester of her sophomore year in Ireland, and spent last June in Uganda through a travel course with other ISU students.
            Sleeping under mosquito nets next to the Nile with a Ugandan roommate was an eye-opening experience for Eggleston.  One thing that struck her was the lack of material possessions.  “I knew that the rural people would have very little but it was hard to imagine while surrounded by the overabundance in America,” she said. “There was nothing that went to waste.”
            Eggleston’s experiences in Uganda and around the world have influenced her to study issues of food distribution, ecological economics, and sustainable agriculture. A quote she admires is “The world is a book, and those who do not travel only read a page.” But when asked to describe the impact of studying abroad, she becomes almost poetic herself, bringing to mind the literary interests of a journalism major Eggleston. “If the world is a book, I felt like I hadn’t even looked at the Table of Contents before I began traveling,” she said. “As you turn the pages, you delve deeper into your own person.”